earthlights

A large light hovers over a peak in
Hessdalen, Norway.
Photo by Leif Havik/Project Hessdalen.

It was that eccentric American collector of anomalous material, Charles
Fort, who compiled the first catalogue of reports of mysterious lights in
the sky, long before anyone had thought to equate such manifestations with
alien spacecraft. In fact, for all his many bizarre ideas, Fort had literally
a down-to-earth view of what the luminous phenomena might be and noted a
possible geographical connection between them and regions prone to earthquakes
and tremors. The name "earth lights" was coined much more recently by British
researcher Paul Devereux, author of the only two full books on the subject.1,
2

In 1954, F. Lagarde matched the centers of activity in a French wave of unidentified flying objects to the location
of geological faults. Two decades later, Canadian researchers Michael Persinger and G. Lafreniere, found a similar pattern of correlation between UFO reports
and sites of tectonic disturbance in North
America. At Hessdalen, southeast of Trondheim, in Norway, geologist Erling
Strang has been monitoring earthlights since the early 1980s, tying the
visual phenomena to local variations in the Earth's magnetic field (see
link below). Strang has found that a typical apparition is matched by a
1,000-fold increase in magnetometer readings.

The most violent tectonic events on Earth happen where oceanic crustal plates
and continental plates meet. One such place is in the northwest of the United
States where a plate under the Pacific Ocean is diving below the continental
US. This movement has lifted up the Cascade
Mountains – a chain of volcanoes,
whose ability to burst spectacularly into life was demonstrated most recently
by the Mount St. Helens eruption. The Cascade peaks are linked by fault
lines and it was over these very mountains that Kenneth Arnold saw the objects that were destined to become the archetypal "flying
saucers".

From every continent come reports of a similar nature. In west Africa, balls
of light seen gliding over the surface of water are called "aku" –
the devil. In Malaysia, aerial lights known as "penangau" are believed to
be the phantom heads of women who died in childbirth. And in the northwest
Australian outback, the so-called "min-min" lights have a sacred significance
to the Aborigines.* That earthlights exist is virtually beyond
doubt. That they are linked in some way to tectonic activity and to sudden
surges in ambient magnetic field strength is on the way to becoming firmly
established. But what remains unknown is the mechanism by which the lights
are created and sustained. In some cases, earthlights have been seen to
persist for up to two hours. Whatever is behind the phenomenon, it is certainly
not a sudden, momentary electrical discharge like that of a lightning strike.

Laboratory studies have offered a few tantalizing clues. In 1981, at the
request of Michael Persinger, Brian Brady of the US Bureau of Mines carried
out an experiment in Denver in which a granite core was crushed in darkened conditions and filmed in slow motion. Afterwards,
the researchers observed lights on the film, flitting out from the decaying
core and moving around the chamber of the rock-crusher. These were only
tiny, transient events. Great slabs of rock grinding against each other
on either side of a fault would release vastly more energy. What is not
clear, however, is how the energy source generating the earthlights could
be maintained and directed for long periods. One problem is that the Earth
is a good conductor and allows any local build-up of charge to leak rapidly
away. This makes it difficult to explain how the charge around an active
fault could remain in place long enough to drive a lengthy UFO display on
the surface or in the sky above.

Some preliminary ideas have been put forward. According to John Derr, of
the U.S. Geological Survey,3, 4 the presence of water in the
rocks may be crucial. Heat produced by tectonic movement, he argues, creates
sheaths of steam which coat the edges of the fault. These sheaths serve
to insulate the build up of charge at the center of the fault from the conducting
rocks further out. Eventually, enough charge accumulates for it to burst
out into the atmosphere and give rise to a visible display. This model,
however, falls short of explaining either the duration or the peculiar behavior
of earthlights.

References

Devereux, Paul. Earth Lights. Turnstone Press, 1982.

Devereux, Paul. Earth Lights Revelation. Blandford, 1989 and
1990. (A long and highly illustrated update was published as a chapter
in UFOs and UFOlogy, with Peter Brookesmith, Blandford/Cassell,
1997).

Teodorani M. and Strand E. P. "Experimental Methods for Studying the
Hessdalen-Phenomenon in the light of the Proposed Theories: a Comparative
Overview," Rapport 1998:5, Høgskolen i Østfold (Norway),
1-93 (1998).

Abstract: Unexplained plasma-like atmospheric "light balls"
are observed at very low altitudes during alternate phases of maximum
and minimum in the Hessdalen area, located in central Norway. Several
theories are presented in order to explain the observed phenomenon;
among these: piezoelectricity from rocks, atmospheric ionization triggered
by solar activity, cosmic rays and extraterrestrial visitation. The
presented study is aimed at proposing the use of a dedicated instrumental
set-up, research experimental procedures and methods in order to prove
or disprove every single theory: in this context several kinds of observational
techniques, measurement strategies and physical tests of tactical relevance
are discussed in detail. An introduction on any considered theory is
presented together with a detailed discussion regarding the subsequent
experimental phase. For each specific theory brief descriptions of the
observable parameters and of the essential instrumental choices and
a detailed discussion of measurement procedures coupled with suitable
flow-charts, are presented.

Correspondence

From Marcos Gonzalez:

I'm originally from Argentina now living in Puerto Rico. I
was astonished to see about the earthlights, especially this paragraph:

"From every continent come reports of a similar nature. In west Africa,
balls of light seen gliding over the surface of water are called "aku"
– the devil. In Malaysia, aerial lights known as "penangau" are believed
to be the phantom heads of women who died in childbirth. And in the northwest
Australian outback, the so-called "min-min" lights have a sacred significance
to the Aborigines."

since there are reports from people who live in the central Argentine
"pampas" that refer to this same phenomenon. People who live there call
it "luz mala" (that is bad light) and they respect it up to the limit
of fear because are believed to be ghost of evil people who died near
the place.

I myself saw one when I was traveling across the pampas. It looked much
like a big cloud burning.

Some people think that the "luz mala" is nothing more than methane clouds
combined with some sort of light refraction effect (like the same visual
effect when seeing an empty road at the distance, you see 'water').